


Counting Steps, Counting Stars

by theblindtorpedo



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Adric is blind, Disabled Character, Friendship, Gen, Presents, slight ableist thinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-28 00:09:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6305767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theblindtorpedo/pseuds/theblindtorpedo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tegan knows she is not especially considerate towards Adric, but she does try in her own way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting Steps, Counting Stars

It is on quiet nights that Tegan fixates. She sits alone in an otherwise empty TARDIS room and he will slide in, and she thinks he must be faking it for all the confidence by which he takes up space. Blind boys couldn’t do that. Shouldn't.

How could he walk around so quickly and easily if he couldn’t see? She asked him that once and he’d grinned at her: “Well, you see it takes an awful lot of concentration. You have to memorize routes and numbers of footsteps and use frequency of echoes and other sounds to triangulate where you are. I’m very good at it I think. If you had years of practice you might even be able to do it someday.”

No, Tegan thought, she quite preferred having the use of her eyes to that.

\-----

Wherever he went a hand was always occupied, sometimes tapping the medal on his chest, tracing a wall, or engaged in some incomprehensible puzzle box. He likes to sit next to her sometimes while she reads and she hates it, because whenever he’s in the room she can’t help watching him. She thinks he knows this and it irritates her further.

“Look at me,” she orders.

“I don’t think that’s really necessary,” he replies, fingers flicking over whatever device he handles, “that is, if you do mean you want me to turn my face towards you. Actually looking at you is a physical impossibility, of course.”

She kicked him out of the room then.

\-----

He says it is his birthday.

So, she digs through TARDIS store rooms and finds a spherical map of an unknown sky, with raised bumps for stars. The map changes completely if you twist the ball certain ways and she thinks it ought to be suitably amusing. Yet she was not prepared for how her gift would be received.

He is ecstatic. His head is thrown up at the ceiling, eyes closed and smile wide as he skims the metallic surface with eager fingers. She watched for longer than she’ll care to admit, fascinated.

And it occurs to her that this is the first time Adric has ever seen the stars.


End file.
